Writing about dance

I love the fact that there is more dance on TV: Dancing With the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, America's Best Dance Crew. But these are reality shows about dance competitions, and there is little room for the display of expertise, whether through the judging or most of the writing about the shows one finds in the press or online. In some of the message boards, like those on Television Without Pity, one can occasionally find the voice of a dancer, teacher or critic who is kind enough to explain something about the different dance styles or techniques to the rest of us fans, but for the most part, we are talking about what we like or don't like, without much regard for the actual standards of aesthetics or technique that are being used by judges, choreographers, or even casting directors.

Joan Acocella writes about ballet and modern dance for the New Yorker. She has a piece on Dancing With the Stars she's right on, both about the dancing and about the gender drama of the show. As she says, the show plays with gender stereotypes (homosexual anxiety for the men, the expectation that women will dance better than the men, and how they are quite anxious about being judged as unfeminine). I just discovered that there is a podcast associated with the piece. It's an interview, not just her voice reading her article. She and her interviewer Blake Eskin watch some clips together and talk (about the first episode). She puts ballroom dancing overall into a historical context, and has some smart things to say about the dynamic of the show, the stereotyped characters played by the judges, and the narrative arc of the show as a reality show, rather than a real dance competition. When they are through, she says she won't be watching again, that the show is trashy. Well, we likes our trash! But even if the show is not to her taste, as a critic in this podcast and article,she contributed something valuable to my way of watching the show, and I enjoyed listening to her. I haven't always agreed with Acocella about dance (I think she was mistaken in her discussion of Bill T Jones, for example), but she isn't afraid to take a strong view and defend it vigorously. That is one of the virtues of her writing.

In this Dance View Times article "What Critics Do", Acocella talks about the work of the dance critic, or the art critic in general. She advocates for the kind of criticism she has been able to practice: uncompromising. But how much space is there for this kind of writing about dance anymore?

Our local dance critic Camille LeFevre has a great piece called "Culturally Relevant? A Dance Critic Looks to the Territory Ahead" in for MNartists.org about the disappearance of salaried dance critics in print journalism, the tension between the Olympian grande dame style of critics like Acocella and the transformation of journalism today. Apparently most major papers, daily and weekly, have fired or eliminated the positions of dance AND film critics; arts writers are going to have to work free-lance, and there is less room for writing that is not puffery. What this will mean for arts writing, in the age of the blog, is not clear. Perhaps we will be able to find the great dance critics and writers online, and perhaps not, but the professional dance community and the general public are the losers for the loss of visibility and credibility that the arts pages have given to forms of dance that are not part of popular culture over the last forty years.